I'øve been editing on MC for several years but recent projects have been heavier in terms of the nhumber of bins and sequences andf I'm wondering iof the 32GB RAM which in 2014 I considered more than adequate should be upgraded to - say 64GB? I'd like to hear the experience of others - how much RAM have you goty installed and can you ever have enough?

Don't have an answer but may I ask what are your Desired Video memory settings? I've got 64gb ram and wanted to set this relatively high, but seen people recommending going 6-8gb or lower which is a bit confusing since what's the point of extra RAM if I'm not running lots of other apps at the same time. Just curious about what you found to be the most optimal, thank you.

In my experience with Media Composer the only thing that's ever made an appreciable difference in performance is a faster processor. 

Hi Adrian,

In my system I have 128 GB of RAM installed. I honestly don't see any advantages of that amount of RAM for Media Composer. For other applications it is another story.

Greetings,

Ivan

I'd agree with Carl's observation about processor speeds - I upgraded my CPU's last year to duial E5-4650L 2.6GHz 8-core (with HT) and the improvement on rendering, encoding, file export and such was noticeable.

But I still find MC - under certain circumstances - sluggish - for example, when scrolling horizontally on the timeline, movement is delayed and not smooth. Altering the timeline zoom is slow top react. Adding a new clip (even on an almost empty sequence) has a few second delay before the clip actiually apears and the timeline is refreshed.

I notice that my windows 7 installation, with no applications running, occupies 3.71GB og my 32GB RAM and with MC running and my current project loaded - but with no video or audio processing tasks (including playback) running, MC raises the memory use to 24.3GB - leaving about 6GB for additional tasks. Is this typical of MC?

Since posting this thread I have certainly no been inundated with testimonials from other users proclaiming the advantages to MC of increased RAM - so maybe there are none? Curious that Avid doesn't appear to have a fact sheet on this seemingly ubiquitous question. :)

Adrian Redmond:

But I still find MC - under certain circumstances - sluggish - for example, when scrolling horizontally on the timeline, movement is delayed and not smooth. Altering the timeline zoom is slow top react. Adding a new clip (even on an almost empty sequence) has a few second delay before the clip actiually apears and the timeline is refreshed.

Could it be related to the media you're using, or the drives the media is on? I've seen sluggishness with higher resolution media, or media that's on slow drives, or drives with a slow connection. Maybe that's it?

I have also noticed a long installed OS tends to "clutter" over time ond slow down. Best to keep the OS lean as possible. Even MS security patches, driver updates, over time in my experience tend to slow things a bit.